


physics and chance

by kickedshins



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Could Be Canon, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Season/Series 01, a touch of skimmons vibes for flavor, post-episode s1e09: repairs, simmons has two hands!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-15 23:54:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29197947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kickedshins/pseuds/kickedshins
Summary: “Competitive, Simmons,” Fitz notes, smirking just a bit. It’s not an expression that feels all that natural on his face, but he thinks he could grow into it if he wanted to.Jemma seems to like it well enough, because she matches it with a sharp glint in her eye. “Leo Fitz,” she warns him, voice warm as the sun-soaked thing unfurling in his chest at the sound of it, “I am going to destroy you.”orFitz and Simmons decide to attempt pranking Skye again. They make a game out of who can babble about made-up science around Skye the longest before she catches on.
Relationships: Leo Fitz & Jemma Simmons & Skye | Daisy Johnson, Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons
Kudos: 19





	physics and chance

**Author's Note:**

> hi. i started writing this fic BEFORE i watched the episode where fitz-simmons decides to prank skye. basically i am a prophet. enjoy some bus kids being friends and flirting just a liiittle bit because what fun is it to have three cute bisexuals the same age being friends without making them flirt a bit (bcuz yeah they ARE all bi even if fitz and simmons do NOT know that about themselves yet. its okay. i trust that they'll unrepress soon.)

“So obviously the pranks didn’t work,” Jemma says primly. She’s very focused, apparently, on not thinking about their near-death experiences.

“Yeah, obviously,” Fitz snaps. He’s busying himself with cleaning one of the tables in the lab, picking up shattered glass and other debris left by the ghost—not _ghost_ , he reminds himself, because Jemma would chide him for using such an unscientific term without care. Not _ghost_. Trapped soul, or something. Body between universes?—and his ransacking of the Bus. 

He glances up from his work just in time to catch the back end of one of Jemma’s secretive, covertly semi-bitchy eyerolls. Fitz likes those eyerolls. He likes that he’s really the only one who is allowed to see them.

“Well, would you like to plan more, then?” she inquires, tone sharp, which is a formal and as-aggressive-as-Jemma-Simmons-gets way of asking her best friend if he’d like to pull grade-school tricks on their co-worker, but Fitz can’t bring himself to mind. It’s very Jemma, after all, and it’s hard for him to mind much about her.

“I would love to,” he assures her. “Did you have anything in mind?”

Jemma hums tightly as she rubs a rag over the top of a nearby table. Her movements are small, cutting, deliberate. “I think we’re better than the childish gag Skye pulled on you the other day,” she says. “We can come up with something a tad more clever to get her back, don’t you think?”

“What, the shaving cream? Ach, that was fun, I think. Besides, she kept insisting that she really wasn’t the one who did it.”

“Well, I doubt it was Ward,” Simmons says, beginning the process of elimination. “I don’t think he would waste his fancy shaving cream on you.”

“How do you know what his shaving cream is like?” Fitz demands, not at all even a little bit upset or jealous or anything of the sort.

“I’m a stress cleaner,” she reminds him. “I’ve overhauled the bathroom more than once in the short amount of time we’ve spent living largely on the Bus.”

“Mmm,” Fitz says, because he could have figured that one out himself, and he’ll likely mortify himself if he says anything else. “And the rest of them—”

“It can’t have been May,” Jemma says decisively, which Fitz agrees with. She does not seem like the type of person who even knows what a goodhearted practical joke is, let alone play one on such a pathetically easy target as Fitz. “And I don’t think Coulson, despite his propensity for putting us all on some sort of equitable playing field, so to speak, would do that to you. And it wasn’t me. Ergo, Skye.”

“It could have been you,” Fitz says, a little bit loftily, a little bit overplaying at aloofness. He bends down to pick up a particularly large piece of broken glass, not meeting Jemma’s eyes.

“It was not,” she says, and that’s final, because he trusts her implicitly.

“So,” Fitz groans, pressing a hand to his lower back as he rises. “Side note: being active is terrible. Did you know that it's terrible? I’m hurting all the damn time.”

Jemma _pfft_ s with half-bitten laughter. “Yes, it is terrible. It’d be nice to simply be able to stay inside our little scientific shell and not have to worry about running about and being knocked out by near-inexplicable specters and whatnot. I think I pulled a shoulder the other day, which– look, I know I shouldn’t complain, but dammit, I am complaining.”

“Ward got shot,” Fitz says. “Not– I mean, not today. The other week, when he and I were on our bro time mission.”

Jemma pinches the bridge of her nose. “I beg you to not,” she says, slowly and breathily and long-sufferingly, “either say the phrase ‘bro time’ or to tell me more about how close you got to dying. Both of them cause me a fair amount of pain.”

“Understandable,” Fitz admits. “Also, I just meant that holy shit, this sort of work is dangerous, and it hurts, and even if you’re not the one who got a little bit shot you’re also not a damned tank the way that man is, and you’re very much allowed to complain about a pulled shoulder, especially when you’re the one _pulling_ in all this valuable data.”

Jemma’s nose pinch turns into a full-on rubbing of her temples. She’s smiling, though, and not her for-the-cameras smile that she usually wears. This one is something a lot more genuine. A little less sanded down, a little less sleek. Something less likely to go slipping through Fitz’s fingers if he tried to hold onto it. 

So he flexes his hands by his sides, behind a table and out of Jemma’s view, and he attempts to grab tight. He says, “Well, that’s a path.”

“Hmm?” Jemma asks, looking up. Her hair, tied up in a ponytail, whips its way over her shoulder. 

“Science,” he says, and that feels like a woefully broad and unexplanatory answer, so he barrels onward into an elaboration. “I mean, obviously we know more about it than anybody else on here.”

“Obviously,” Jemma says, that rough and real smile still clinging to her lips. It makes Fitz’s foot tap against the ground as if by doing that he can purge himself of the tingle of energy that shoots through him when she offers up this very real part of herself to him. 

“And while Skye is not a—” Fitz doesn’t want to call anyone a meathead, because it feels like a cruel assessment, but he’s also pretty sure that Ward would have played rugby and also shoved him into a locker had they gone to any sort of traditional high school together “—while Skye is certainly more knowledgable of things such as technology,” Fitz decides on saying, “she has absolutely zero understanding of any of your area of expertise, and only part of mine.”

“So, what, you want to make her feel stupid? That’s not very kind,” Jemma says, smile sliding away, her face screwing up like she’s bitten down on a lemon. “Nor is it really what I’d definitionally refer to as a ‘prank’, so—”

“That’s not at all what it is,” Fitz assures her quickly, waving his hands at her as if he can physically dispel her misunderstanding. “I just think we could make a solid bet out of who can spew absolute nonsensical bullshit around her for the longest without her catching on.”

Jemma bites her lip, clearly holding back a grin. “It’s a bit mean,” she says carefully, voice bubbling with a quiet sort of laughter, “but. Hmm. What do I get when I win?”

“ _If_ you win,” Fitz says, wagging a finger in her direction like some strict schoolteacher, “you can— damn, I actually hadn’t thought this far ahead. I hadn’t thought any degree of far ahead; I came up with that one on the spot.”

“Did you?” Jemma says, sounding mildly impressed. “Well, it’s a great idea.”

“Thanks,” he responds, scratching at the back of his head. “Okay, never mind the details of who gets what when who wins. Are the rules just that the last one to get caught wins?”

Jemma shakes her head firmly, ponytail whooshing back and forth. “That doesn’t at all accurately take into account the proper amount of time each of us spend B.S.ing her. I think we need accountability for this. I’ll trust you to keep an eye on me while I’m talking to her, and I’ll do the same for you. We each have to give an attempt at least once every three hours. Whoever gets through more three-hour blocs wins.”

“Competitive, Simmons,” Fitz notes, smirking just a bit. It’s not an expression that feels all that natural on his face, but he thinks he could grow into it if he wanted to.

Jemma seems to like it well enough, because she matches it with a sharp glint in her eye. “Leo Fitz,” she warns him, voice warm as the sun-soaked thing unfurling in his chest at the sound of it, “I am going to destroy you.”

Predictably, she does. Fitz puts up a decent fight, though.

“The odds were rigged against me,” he groans to himself, more to pass the time and fill still air than anything. “Skye doesn’t _know_ anything about biochem. She knows at least a bit about engineering. Whyyy.”

He’s seated on one of the white chairs in the lounge-type area of the Bus, and his feet are up on the white seat, and Coulson would absolutely kill him if he was unfortunate enough to be privy to this display of blatant disrespect to the upholstery, but Fitz does not really care about that right now. What he cares about is sinking into the seat and never returning, because Jemma is on a roll, and neither Skye—just a few steps away from Jemma—nor Fitz himself—on basically the other side of the plane, width-wise—can seem to look away.

He can’t hear all of what she’s saying, because Jemma is decent about keeping her volume in check most of the time, and the plane, advanced as it is, is still constantly filled with a (quite soothing, actually; he’s finding that it’s a lot easier to work in the lab on the plane than it often is to work in labs outside of it, where his colleagues would frequently ask for a bit of silence to focus) layer of white noise due to its engines and its propulsion through the sky. But what he can hear is impressively made-up, and impressively real-sounding. Were it not for the fact that he’s been best friends with Jemma for ten years and has picked up on biochem vocabulary here and there, he would have no clue that what she was saying was absolutely and completely devoid of meaning.

Fitz picks up on Jemma rattling off a collection of nonsense to Skye: “... and so you’d want to use that sort of, you know, rudimentary structure of what a Dyson sphere could be in order to affix the quarks that make up those Francium atoms to the— so sorry, Skye, am I boring you terribly?”

Skye blinks violently. Fitz attempts to withhold a bark of laughter at his front-row view to her clearly snapping back to the real world, visibly having pretty much entirely tuned out Jemma’s stream of biochemical jargon. 

“Uh,” Skye says, hedging a bit around the fact that there is really no good answer to that question, “no? But I do think I have, uh… Ward, he wanted to… you know,” she says, throwing a lame punch through the air, looking more like a kitten pawing at yarn than a fighter defending herself from any sort of semi-competent foe. “Training and shit.”

“Mmm,” Jemma says primly, complacently, kindly. “Well, you go on and have fun, then.”

As Skye slinks by Jemma, she puts a hand on Jemma’s shoulder and leans in close. Fitz can’t hear what she’s saying, and her hair curtains her mouth such that Fitz can’t attempt to read her lips, but whatever she says to Jemma has her pinking slightly at the cheeks.

And with a friendly jostle to Jemma’s shoulder, Skye is gone.

Jemma rushes over to Fitz. “That was great,” she says, a bit breathlessly. “Skye’s great, you know? Honestly, and I don't mean to be at all ungrateful for you or for anyone else, of course, but I'm just saying, it’d be nice to have that sort of undevoted attention when—”

“Simmons,” Fitz interrupts, aiming for his tone to be of the light let-down variety and tumbling past of that zone, past three others, and bruising his way to a stop in the area marked _absolutely unnecessarily bitchy dreams-ruining_. “She was not paying even a shred of attention.”

Something twitches slightly under Jemma’s right eye, and she presses her lips firmly together for a second before rolling her shoulders back a nearly imperceptible touch and tapping her thumb against the palm of her other hand. “Oh,” she says, and then, firmer, “oh. Was she not? I felt that she was. At least, I hope I'm able to tell when someone's paying attention to me... am I terribly terrible at that?"

"Simmons," Fitz says again, trying to pack as much reassurance as he can into her name.

"Well, then," Jemma sighs. "If Skye wasn't paying attention to me, does this count? For our… for whatever it is we’re doing.”

“Of course,” Fitz assures her. “In fact, with a person like Skye, it nearly counts double. I mean, I’m sure she’d love to call either of us out on… well, something. Anything.”

“You’re right,” Jemma says, relaxing a little. “She probably would.”

“You know, like one of those AI programs that mindlessly scans swaths of text and only awakens when a red-flag inaccuracy crops up, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Jemma says, relaxing a little more. “Okay. Then that’s one for me and none for you. I wish you the best of luck.”

Fitz starts down the length of the plane to where he’s positive Skye is holed up in her sleeping quarters, and not at all exchanging blows with Ward. After a few steps, though, he pauses, and turns back to Jemma.

She’s right behind him, as she often tends to be. “What?” she asks.

“What’d Skye say to you?” he inquires. “Whatever it was she said seemed to get you a bit—” he gestures awkwardly at his own face, at the apples of his cheeks, at a blush that could potentially rise in them “—heated.”

Jemma coughs into her hand. “Nothing,” she says. “She just offered to train me a little bit, too. If I wanted. I believe her exact words were, er.” Jemma puts up her hands tentatively to prepare for air quotes. “She said that if I was ever the one who wished to be taught instead of doing the teaching myself, she’d be glad to pass on the self-defense information Ward has given her to me. She said that she would be fine with… ‘getting physical’ with me.”

Fitz blinks owlishly. “Was she… I’m not trying to– this isn’t me being presumptuous or anything, but considering the sort of– what information _has_ Ward given her vis-a-vis the, you know, getting physical? Was she– Simmons, was she coming onto y—”

“I doubt it,” Jemma says quickly. “I think she’s just sort of like that? But, ah. I mean, I wouldn’t have to, obviously, considering that S.H.I.E.L.D. has given us, as agency members, a knowledge of the basics of self-defense, which is hopefully all that we’ll ever need to employ.” She rattles it off as if she's a handbook. Fitz isn't entirely convinced.

“Mhm,” he says. “And how many missions have we already been on where a more-than-basic understanding of self-defense would have been helpful?”

Jemma looks confused. “Sorry, are you suggesting that I take her up on that, or—”

“No!” Fitz says a little too loudly and a little too quickly. He amends, “I mean, if you think you need it, then, yes, brilliant idea. But if she…”

“She wasn’t coming onto me,” Jemma assures him—assures him? Does he really need assurance?—with a small laugh. “And, besides, even if she was, which I really do not think is the case, it’s not as if I… you know…”

“Uh-huh,” Fitz says, nodding vigorously. “Swing that way. Me, too. Or, I mean, no, I _do_ swing that way. ‘That way’ being towards women. Oh, Jesus, that makes me sound like a womanizer, doesn’t it.”

“I can promise you that I will never be so disillusioned as to think you are a womanizer,” Jemma swears, which feels just a bit like an insult, but Fitz feels like he probably shouldn’t say that.

“Great,” he says, giving her a thumbs-up and very much wanting to not be having this conversation. “Great. I’m going to go pester Skye with made-up science now.”

“Great,” Jemma parrots, and she follows him down the length of the plane.

When he gets to Skye’s quarters—right next to his own, they’re all packed in like sardines that happen to be in a particularly spacious tin—he raps on her door with his knuckles twice in quick succession. “Skye?” he calls, waiting for her response.

The clacking sounds (she’s typing, of course) from beyond the sliding door stop. Fitz looks back at Jemma, half-hidden in shadows, the picture of amateur espionage, to occupy the time it takes for Skye to (from the sound of it) close her computer, shuffle away some papers, stub her toe, swear violently, and open the door with a grimace.

“Hey,” Skye says, breathing hard. One arm is braced against metal and plastic that frames the entrance to her sleeping quarters, and the other is propped against her hip. “The beds have stupid corners. What’s up?”

Fitz realizes that he has absolutely zero game plan, which is idiotic of him, because he’s had time to plan for this and simply hasn’t. He spends a mortifyingly silent three seconds spinning every single gear that exists in his brain, and then another three hemming and hawing, and finally, he says, “I have a technological issue I wanted to run by you.”

“Cool cool cool,” Skye says, and then clicks her tongue against the back of her teeth. “Well, come on in.” She opens the door a bit further and gestures for him to enter.

This is unsteady territory for Fitz. It’s less the fact that it’s Skye’s _bedroom_ and more the fact that it’s _Skye’s_ bedroom. Their friendship is still building itself, and he hasn’t spent much one-on-one time with her, and entering her personal space seems like a pretty big leap from occasional jokes and even more occasional attempts at– flirting with her? Impressing her? He’s not entirely clear on that, but he is clear on the fact that he really likes Skye, likes her attention, likes her smarts, likes her companionship, and he does not want to somehow mess that up.

Fitz can’t look back at Jemma, but if he could, he’d be shooting her an apologetic glance. As it stands, though, he just trusts that she’ll trust him, or at least listen in through the door, and he follows Skye inward.

Her quarters are neat, which is surprising. He says, “Huh.”

“What, not to your liking?” Skye asks, throwing herself onto her bed, her body landing with precarious closeness to her computer. The sheets are tucked tight across the corners, as if she hasn’t recently been underneath them. 

“It’s– I don’t really think I have a set vision of a ‘liking’ for other people’s bedrooms, you know? I’m just a bit thrown by the fact that it doesn’t seem particularly… you? No offense,” he says quickly.

He’s not sure if he should sit, or stand, or what, but Skye solves that problem by patting the bed and gesturing him forward with a jerk of her chin. 

She says, “Yeah, well, I’m in the habit of traveling and living light. Don’t got a lot of posters to hang, or whatever, you know?”

That’s a fair point, and one he hadn’t thought of, and now he feels a little bit awful, but Skye doesn’t seem to have been slighted. She continues, “Also, I’m used to living in a small space, but this little room is a pretty small space. Not a ton of room for me to decorate even if I wanted to.”

“Fair,” Fitz agrees. He crosses his legs and then uncrosses them.

Skye asks, “So, what brings you to my humble abode? Tech problem? Computer giving you an issue?” She gives him a playful wink. “Can’t figure it out yourself, mister engineering man?”

“Don’t worry, I’m not coming to you for I.T. support,” he laughs, and inwardly pumps a fist when she flashes a broad smile in his direction. “I just had an idea that I wanted to run by you so that I could get a second opinion.”

“Mmm, trouble in Fitz-Simmons paradise?” Skye muses, winding a lock of hair around her finger.

“Not at all,” he tells her. “It’s just that this isn’t really her area of expertise.”

“Not mine, either,” Skye says. “I do the hacky shit, remember? Using the devices, not making ‘em.”

“You still would know more than anyone else on the Bus would,” Fitz says, just a touch too fast, trying desperately not to trip over his own tongue.

“‘Kay,” Skye says. She pulls her legs under her, crossing them, and leans towards him. “Lay it on me.”

Fitz combs his hand through his hair. “It’s, ah, it’s about the. Okay. So, I’m trying to create something that would ostensibly track a person’s physical footprint and digital footprint at the same time. Basically associating purchases to place, or activity to location. Stuff like that. I’m sure there are programs that exist– in fact, I’m sure you’re quite familiar with programs that are used for this sort of thing, yes?”

Skye nods. She’s visibly chewing on the inside of her cheek, eyes set with focus. 

“R–right,” Fitz says. “So I’d need to fit that sort of AI programming inside of a—”

“Would you need a complicated AI?” Skye interjects. “What level are we talking here? Is it just a rudimentary finding patterns sort of thing, or is it predicting future patterns, and if so, is it reacting to those patterns, past or present or future, and—”

Fitz holds a hand up. “Skye,” he says.

Another person would have said _sorry_. Skye’s the sort who has trained herself out of habits like that. It’s not that she _isn’t_ sorry for interrupting him, it’s just that this is who she is—chatty, smart, ready to dive straight into things—and she’s not going to apologize for that. So instead of saying _sorry_ , Skye just nods in understanding, and says, “Go on.”

Fitz really should have written up a script beforehand, or something. Or maybe decided with Jemma on a less stressful and multi-step trick to play on Skye. He starts again: “That’s not the sort of issue I’m having with it. I need to figure out how to—”

Fitz cuts himself off, changing his mind mid-thought-stream. He has to switch tracks entirely; he can’t be talking about something Skye might actually know about. Once again he curses both his lack of preliminary planning and also Simmons for having it easy. Stupid biochem. Stupid sciences that Skye has never even brushed hands with.

“Actually,” Fitz says, waving a hand in front of him, “scratch that. Just forget it entirely.”

Skye looks at him quizzically through dark lashes. “Okay,” she says, humoring him.

“There’s this sort of robot thing I’m working on,” Fitz starts, which is a half-truth, and half-truths are easier to build upon than complete lies. And then he elaborates, “Well, robot is a bit of a vague term.”

“Mhm,” Skye nods. “And you need my help on this robot… why?”

“Not your help, necessarily,” Fitz corrects gently. “Though it’d be great if you could give it. That’s simply a possible want on the side, though. What I _need_ is just a second opinion. Again, you’re the only one on the Bus who has the same sort of appreciation for technology as I do.”

“Simmons doesn’t—”

“Simmons is near-perfect,” Fitz says quickly. “Simmons also has probably heard me talk about this sort of thing for long enough to last ten lifetimes.”

“One for each year of your guys’ friendship. Cute,” Skye says, semi-bitterly, which is uncalled for.

“I guess?” he says awkwardly. His collar feels just a little tight.

“Anyway,” Skye says, pushing forward. “Your robot. What about it?

“Right, so,” Fitz begins, nodding in a way he hopes is hypnotic enough to lull her into bored complacency. He really wants to win this bet with Jemma. “Coulson wants me to build a– a sort of companion animal?”

“Don’t things like that already exist?” Skye asks. “Pretty sure I’ve seen a few heartwarming vids about proto-robo-dogs fetching balls, or whatever.”

“Yes, sure, but this’d be different. Less heavy, for one thing, as to optimize mobility and to decrease the destructive, deteriorative effect of the creature’s weight on its joints. You know that that’s why humans have issues with things like their knees? Simmons told me once: it’s less a question of biology and more a question of physics. Literal wear and tear.”

“Adorable,” Skye deadpans. “You guys can bond over the intersection of your sciences and also creaky joints.”

Fitz feels his face heat up a bit. “I got off track,” he says. “The point of all this is I’m having a bit of difficulty figuring out the relationship between the creature’s hardware-slash-software and its basic mechanics. Which is where you come in, naturally.”

“Ah, so you do need my help.”

“A touch,” Fitz says. “So, currently my schematics are presuming that I’d be using a series of kinematic chains for the thing’s mobility. And, naturally, that poses some challenges.”

“Naturally,” Skye says, eyes a little too wide and head bobbing up and down a little too slowly for her to properly shield the fact that she clearly does not know what he’s talking about.

“And, okay– actually, wait, Skye, do you know what tensegrity is?”

Skye pauses for a moment. In that moment, Fitz can see her assessing if she wants to tell the truth or not, let him know that she doesn’t know, make herself seem just a little bit dumber. Which is ridiculous, obviously, because she could probably ramble for a half-hour about hacking and he wouldn’t understand a word, and that wouldn’t at all make him any less smart than she is.

Then again, Fitz has always had another half of himself. He’s always had Simmons. And, nine times out of ten, the two of them can figure out anything if they put their heads together and try. It’s a combination of Simmons’ wells of knowledge upon which he can draw, and that she’s a fantastic person to bounce ideas off of, and the simple fact that her presence makes him feel a bit steadier, a bit more confident, a bit more Leo Fitz. 

Skye has not had that luxury. She isn’t allowed to admit defeat. Suddenly, Fitz feels as if he’s been very, very cruel.

Skye says, “Yeah, I know what that is.”

Nowhere to go but onwards, Fitz supposes. “And you know what a parallel manipulator is?”

At this, Skye seems to give in. She lifts a shoulder and hazards a guess. “A man who stands next to you, whose spine has the same slope as yours, and who lies a lot? Shit, Fitz, I have no clue.”

“Aha,” Fitz laughs awkwardly, “no. It’s—”

“Dude,” Skye says. “I’m sorry, but if you’re going to spend twenty minutes explaining what the hell a flux capacitor is to me, or whatever—”

“I can do that, if you want,” Fitz says brightly. 

Skye gives him a look that’s borderline insane. “No, you can’t, because that’s… not a real thing. _You_ know that, right? It’s from freakin’ _Back to the Future_.”

Fitz knows this, but he also assumed that she would not. He thought it was one of those things that everyone, via collective cultural osmosis, just accepted as being part of the Real Scientific Canon.

He should have just stuck to what Jemma did and thrown together technically real terms in wildly inaccurate ways. “Yes,” he says, and then, dumbly, “Uh.”

Something in Skye’s expression shifts. Her face flickers like a broken screen, oscillating wildly between emotional channels —hurt, stonily furious, confused as hell, amused in a manic sort of way—before settling on neutral. She says, “Have you been bullshitting me?”

“Not… yes?”

“ _Not yes_ ,” Skye mocks. “The hell?”

“I can explain,” Fitz says. And then, childishly, he grumbles, “Simmons was bullshitting you, too. Earlier.”

“Jesus motherfucking Christ on a bicycle,” Skye groans, putting her head in her hands.

“I think if they’d had bicycles back then, his whole pre-death trek around with that cross thing would have gone a lot faster,” Fitz jokes.

Despite herself, Skye snorts into her fingers. “Fitz.”

“Jemma and I,” he starts, and at the usage of Jemma’s first name, Skye’s head twists up to look at him.

“Go on,” she says.

He coughs. “Er. Yes. Simmons and I were just… continuing that freshman prank thing. You know. Initiating you into the group, so to speak. And also we bet on it? That whoever could go the longest making up science nonsense around you would win?”

“Jesus _Christ_ ,” Skye repeats, more emphatically. “You guys are such nerds.”

Fitz, who has included _nerd_ in his list of primary personality traits for as long as he can remember, feels it’s unfair to take offense at this, even if the tone Skye is using makes it very clear that her intention is for him to be offended.

“So what’s Simmons gonna win?” Skye asks. “She had me fooled earlier. Mostly because I was very emphatically not listening to a word she said.”

“She has a lovely voice,” Fitz admits. “It’s easy to zone out to.” And then he shakes his head, physically reminding himself to stay on track. “Also, I don’t know. We hadn’t come up with the logistics of the endgame yet.”

Skye flops back onto her bed dramatically and then lifts her head and thunks it against her pillow as if to emphasize how deeply this whole situation makes her never want to talk to Fitz-Simmons ever again. From her supine position, she says, “Then I get to decide.”

“Sorry,” Fitz says. “What?”

Skye hauls herself up, tossing a loose braid over her shoulder. “I win,” she says decisively. “I figured out that you guys were pulling my leg. I win. Simmons gets second place, and you lose, sorry,” she tells him, patting him on the shoulder patronizingly.

He shakes her off. “I really don’t think that’s— whoa!”

Skye has gotten up from the bed and has pulled Fitz along with her. “Come on,” she says, tightening her grip around his wrist. Her hands are strong. _Probably from all that typing_ , Fitz thinks, and then he thinks, _that is the most idiotic thought I have ever had in my life._

She tugs him towards the door, and he stumbles to keep pace. “We’re going to find Simmons,” she says, striding into the corridor.

Their search doesn’t take long, because Simmons is standing right there. “Hi,” Jemma says, waving her hand flutteringly, each of her fingers the wing of some sickly butterfly. Her other arm is wrapped tightly around her front, hand gripping the opposite side of her waist, and her mouth is pinched in an almost-smile.

“Genuine question,” Skye starts, turning her gaze on Jemma with the ferocity of some wild cat. “Do you ever get a tension headache from how firmly clenched every muscle in your body is? Like, does it cause you to have a chronic migraine issue? I feel like it would.”

Fitz tries desperately to not have any sort of reaction to that. It’s just that it was really funny, and Fitz is really bad at controlling his reactions sometimes, and he chokes on a birdlike laugh that is piercingly loud in the tense stillness of the hall.

Jemma opens her mouth, and then lets out an awkward _ahahaha_ , and then closes her mouth, and then raises an eyebrow, and then opens it again, but by that point, Skye has already linked her free arm through Jemma’s and is pulling her—along with Fitz—towards the kitchen area of the plane.

Behind Skye’s back, Jemma shouts at Fitz with her eyebrows. Their wriggling says _what the actual hell_.

He grimaces, trying to express the proper level of _she’s pretty pissed_ with his face.

Jemma rolls her eyes and scoffs lightly. _No fucking shit she’s pissed, Sherlock. Great going._

Fitz attempts to give her an _I’m sorry!_ , but before he can, Skye lets go of the two of them and takes a step back. She surveys them carefully, worrying her lower lip with her teeth, and she says, “You suck at pranks.”

“You’re the one who sprayed shaving cream on my face,” Fitz says, at the same time as Jemma says, “I thought it was an alright idea.”

“One,” Skye says, pointing at Fitz, “I did not. I swear. And, two,” she continues, pointing at Jemma, “it was… fine? Just, like, so much work for pretty much no payoff. It was a better competition than it was prank, I’ll give you that. Buuut, sucks for you two, because I won! And Fitz here tells me that you guys hadn’t formalized prizes or penalties—”

Fitz prays with passion for a hole to open up in the floor and drop him through the sky, but apparently, the Powers That Be are too busy for him at the moment. 

“—so I get to decide them,” Skye finishes, grinning deviously. It would be even more terrifying if it wasn’t so attractive, but as it stands, Fitz is afraid enough, thank you very much. 

“I don’t think that’s really all that fair,” Jemma starts to argue.

At that moment, though, the plane lurches underneath them. Fitz stumbles, falls, tangles himself up in the arms of the nearest person, who just so happens to be a legless Jemma. She’s half-airborne too, unsure in her direction, and more than happy to collide with him. 

Distantly, Fitz thinks about the inherent gravitational attraction between masses. It’s physics that they’re drawn together. Physics and chance and maybe, just maybe, a subconscious knowledge of the fact that they’ll always manage to prop each other up.

“Hi,” he says, face just a little too close to Jemma’s. “So sorry. I’m—”

“You are a touch close,” Jemma says tightly, her voice slightly tremulous with the tension of paying close attention to her word chioce. “If you wouldn’t mind taking just a hint of a step—”

Somewhere in the distance, Fitz can hear Skye sigh. “Such a proper way of asking him to back the fuck up,” she groans. “I hate British ‘people’.”

The air quotes are audible. Fitz is about to open his mouth and inform her of the heavy sociopolitical implications of grouping him in as “British” when the intercom crackles to life.

“Sorry about that,” comes May’s disembodied voice from overhead. “Turbulence. Buckle up.”

The plane shudders again, a heaving thing, and Fitz can’t manage to stay in place. He and Jemma twist and turn through the kitchen, holding onto each other. He ends up stabilizing himself against a counter, one hand on its lip and the other on Jemma’s shoulder. She has one hand on the flat of the countertop itself, her arm snaking over his, and her other hand is gripping the front of his shirt with white-knuckled tightness. This time, she doesn’t ask him to step away.

Skye, for her part, has landed on the floor. “Fuck,” she groans from somewhere over Jemma’s shoulder. And then she starts to say more, but Fitz is having a bit of trouble concentrating on what she’s saying when Jemma’s close enough that their noses would bump if the plane hit a patch of rough air.

“You alright?” she asks.

“Back hurts,” he says. “And this counter isn’t helping it. But I’ll live. You?”

Jemma releases his shirt a bit shakily. She pats him on the chest twice, two steady taps in sync with his heartbeat, and says, overly bright, “Never better.”

Fitz tunes back into what Skye is saying in time to catch her saying, “Sound good?”

“Yeah,” Fitz says, trying very hard not to look deep into Jemma’s eyes, because that would be disgustingly cliched, and because he’d probably blush. “Sounds great.”

“Fantastic,” Skye says, clapping her hands together loudly.

The sound shoots through the air like a gunshot. Jemma jumps back from Fitz and brushes her shirt off, which is ridiculous, because it’s not as if she dirtied it. She tucks her hair behind one ear, turns to Skye, and says, “So sorry. I missed a bit of that.”

“Fitz just agreed that since he lost, he has to go tell Ward why I’m not meeting him for training today,” Skye says gleefully. 

“Oh,” Fitz says, furrowing his brow. “I honestly thought you’d decide on something worse.”

Jemma looks as if she wants to tell Skye off for skipping training with her S.O., but she wisely keeps her mouth shut while Skye is on the war path, if pawning off making excuses counts as a war path.

“You gotta tell him I’m skipping ‘cuz it’s that time of month,” Skye says bluntly.

“Is– is it?” Fitz asks tentatively, to which Jemma responds with a harder-than-necessary swat to the arm.

“No,” Skye laughs. “I just want you to have to suffer through him being angry at me and being angry at you for being the messenger and then him having to try to rant in a non-offensive way about how even in times like this I shouldn’t be skipping.”

“You’re downright evil,” Fitz says. 

“Don’t you know it,” Skye agrees, flashing him a smile. “But, on a serious note, if you ever do get around to making a robotic dog, _please_ get me to code it. I’d fucking love that.”

“I promise that I will,” Fitz says, and he means it.

“Cool,” Skye says, grin widening. And with a toss of her braid and a rap of her knuckles against the surface of the counter as she passes, she’s gone.

As soon as Skye is out of sight, Jemma relaxes with a sigh, deflating like a balloon. "That could have gone worse," she says.

Before Fitz can agree, the plane, treacherous bastard, bane of Fitz’s existence, jumps again. And Fitz’s body, treacherous bastard, bane of Fitz’s existence, falls forward into Jemma.

They fall with a crash onto the floor. Fitz rolls off of her as quickly as humanly possible, knocking his foot against the counter in the process, but he really does not care. He would die, probably, if Skye had chosen that time to come back and had seen him sprawled on top of Jemma. But thankfully, one thing is going right in the world, because the area is Skye-less.

“Sorry,” he says to Jemma. He sticks out an arm, and she takes it gratefully.

“It’s alright!” she tells him, pulling herself up. “It wasn’t your fault. I mean, if you need someone to blame, you should blame the plane. Ha. Blame the plane. That almost rhymes. Or, the air, I suppose, would be more apt, because it's the air's fault that the plane— you understand mechanics. You understand torque and drag and turbulence."

"I do," Fitz agrees. Her hand is pressed against the skin covering his veins. He wonders if she can feel his pulse.

When she’s standing, she doesn’t let go. Her fingers twitch almost imperceptibly against his forearm. She says, “Well. You should go find Ward, shouldn’t you?”

Fitz groans. “Must I?”

“You must,” Jemma says, finally releasing her hold on him. 

He wants to chase the warmth of her fingers, wants to press it against his skin again. He restrains himself, though, because he’s not insane.

They really don’t touch often, the two of them. In passing, sure: brushing by each other in the lab, fingers grazing as they hand tools and parts and equipment to each other, quick taps on the shoulder to grab attention. But they don’t hug much, and they don’t hold hands, or anything like that ( _probably because you are twenty-six, not twelve_ , his brain supplies helpfully), and it feels like the seconds that Jemma spends holding onto his arm are longer seconds than normal. As if them touching was in and of itself something fantastic enough to warp time.

Jemma pats him on the shoulder lightly. “Go on, now,” she says. “I can plan our next idea while you’re gone, if you’d like.”

“I think Skye might kill us if we mess with her again,” Fitz says.

“Good point,” Jemma agrees. “Then I suppose I’ll go get some work done. Would you come swing by the lab after you have your chat with Ward? I’d love to throw a few new ideas at you.”

“Of course,” Fitz says.

“Brilliant,” Jemma says, smiling winningly at him as he backs out of the room. He’s still looking at her. “I can’t wait for your return.”

**Author's Note:**

> at this point i have only watched 12 episodes of this show (and written two fics! because i am insane! and cannot stop thinking about it!) so apologies if this is wildly ooc lol <3 also not shoehorned into the fic (i COULD have stuck it in there i know i could have but i was already at so many words and i did not need to make this dumb lil fic even longer) but very important to me is jewish fitz and trans fitzsimmons <3 thank u for ur time <3
> 
> also if you couldn't tell i am NOT a stem kid lol i spent more time on random wiki pages for physics concepts to write this than i did to like... study for my the phys quiz i have on monday that i wrote this instead of studying for. sorry if my intentionally made-up science is even more painfully made-up than i wanted it to be.
> 
> if you wanna see more of my thoughts on this show come find me @ kickdshins on twitter, and, as always, kudos/comments are greatly appreciated :D thanks for reading !


End file.
